They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what about its weight? If you struggle to hold it in one hand and get cramp holding it in two then that book is telling you something about itself. It’s saying, “Look out, I’m a work of some heft not to be lightly dismissed.” If ever a book deserves to be called a tome it is Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton. At a stupefying 596 pages, Hard Choices contains Clinton’s reflections on her time as US secretary of state, but it is many things besides a memoir. For instance, it is heavy enough to hurl at an erring husband and do some serious damage without actually committing manslaughter; always a bonus in the Clinton household. The book claims to be about the past, but really it’s about the future. At 66 years of age, the author is a former first lady and a former secretary of state. Although she has yet to declare that she will stand, in Hard Choices Clinton makes clear in every calculated sentence that her interest is not in being a former anything, but a future president of the United States.

As a consequence, the poor woman cannot look back in languor. Even the book’s title seems to have been chosen for maximum dullness because to be witty or provocative would be proof that Clinton, being female, was essentially unserious. (A reader competition in the Washington Post came up with the much tarter: “The Scrunchie Chronicles: 112 Countries and It’s Still All About My Hair.”) Not for Hillary the wry, retrospective chuckle over some work prank or a delicious bitchy jab at a ghastly colleague. On the contrary, every person Clinton has ever worked with, or possibly even met in the queue for the ladies’ room, is praised within these pages. How the eyelids begin to droop as yet another crop of Biffs, Jeds and Tanias is exalted for a remarkable contribution to public service, or for doing their job, as it’s also known. The one individual Clinton can’t bring herself to celebrate unreservedly is fickle, flaky Hamid Karzai. Quite clearly, Hillary thinks the President of Afghanistan is a dirty rat who made her life hell by switching allegiances overnight. “He seemed to blame Americans more than the Taliban for the violence in his country. That was hard to stomach,” Clinton admits. It’s as damning as she allows herself to get.

The new Hillary, the one who ran for the Democratic nomination against Barack Obama and lost, has had to learn to balance idealism and pragmatism. “Like it or not, Karzai was a linchpin of our mission in Afghanistan,” she concedes through gritted teeth.

One reason often given for bright women failing to break through the glass ceiling is that they simply will not suck up to people they despise (for complex, tribal reasons, or perhaps because they are shallow and unprincipled, men seem to struggle less with this). Cultivating good relations with people you despise is practically the job description for secretary of state. Thus, we see Hillary having to adopt diverse strategies for dealing with the misogynist dinosaurs who run half the planet. In a touching episode, she urges Aung San Suu Kyi to say something nice in a speech about President Thein Sein, who has effectively been Suu Kyi’s jailer. “I knew from years of painful experience how hard it can be to be cordial, let alone collegial, with those who had once been your political adversaries,” admits Clinton.

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To a revealing extent, Clinton’s personal journey – from famously thin-skinned, politically correct Democrat to ruthlessly flexible secretary of state who urges on a mission to kill Osama bin Laden with an expletive (deleted) – mirrors her country’s changing approach to global leadership. Soft and hard power, masculine and feminine, liberal and conservative, must walk hand in hand, she comes to realise. Just before Hard Choices was published, five Taliban leaders were released from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the freedom of American Sgt Bowe Bergdahl. This was the fruit of negotiations begun by Hillary Clinton at a time when the idea of doing business with the Taliban was anathema. Boy, has she come a long way.

By and large, Hard Choices has been unfavourably reviewed in the US, where one CNN commentator dubbed it “50 shades of boring”. Certainly, there are long passages where you may find yourself having to pinch your arm – Clinton’s own technique for staying awake during tedious summits. Many paragraphs would not be out of place in a junior-school geography lesson: “Burma is a nation of close to 60 million people strategically located between the Indian subcontinent and the Mekong Delta region of south-east Asia… Its ancient pagodas and lush beauty captured the imagination of travellers and writers like Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell.”

Thank you, Hillary – or rather, thank you Hillary’s team of researchers – for those sub-Thomas Cook gems. There were times when I almost gave up as Clinton continued her methodical plod through every country she had visited as secretary of state. It’s Tuesday so it must be Jakarta. But it would have been a big mistake to throw this book down because a) it would have broken my foot and b) I would have missed a fascinating insight into the only woman who has, or has ever had, a genuine shot at being leader of the free world.

Beneath its strenuously statesmanlike surface, Hard Choices tells us what it takes to evolve from a clever, passionately idealistic young feminist into a broad tough enough and cynical enough for the highest office. “In our political culture, saying you made a mistake is often taken as weakness when in fact it can be a kind of strength and growth for people and nations,” Clinton writes before admitting she made the mistake of her life when she voted for the Iraq war. This is strength, not weakness: without that apology Clinton knows she is unelectable.

Hard Choices is a big improvement on Living History, an account of Clinton’s time as first lady so saccharine it should have won an award for services to dentistry. Keen to banish her reputation for frosty arrogance, Clinton adopted an effusive, wide-eyed style designed to reassure voters that she was not the “castrating” feminist of legend, but a God-fearing muffin baker. It is greatly to her credit that the new volume, though full of all the pieties and patriotic sentiment demanded of an American leader, is often contrary and razor sharp. It’s as though Hillary, having endured all the sexist taunts they could throw at her – “Life’s a bitch – so don’t... vote for one!” ran the T-shirt slogan – has decided that she simply doesn’t care anymore. Or, rather, that caring and being hurt is unproductive.

In South Korea, a young student asks if it’s difficult to deal with misogynistic leaders around the world. “I responded that I would guess that many leaders choose to ignore the fact that they’re dealing with a woman when they’re dealing with me. But I try not to let them get away with that. (None the less, it is an unfortunate reality that women in public life still face an unfair double standard. Even leaders like prime minister Julia Gillard of Australia have faced outrageous sexism, which shouldn’t be tolerated in any country.)”

She makes the double-standard point in brackets, and doesn’t return to it. That would be whining, and Clinton is at pains here not to give her enemies ammunition. Nevertheless, the theme resurfaces. Talking about the assassinated Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography, Daughter of Destiny, she says: “It tells a riveting story of how determination, hard work, and political smarts enabled her rise to power in a society where many women lived in strict isolation, called purdah.” As an American, Hillary Clinton does not live in purdah, but a man in the audience at a campaign rally can still yell at her, “Iron my shirt!”

Throughout this book, Hillary Clinton drops in obligatory stories about family and friendship which prove that she is likeable, and just like us. It’s not true. She’s not just like us. Almost inhumanly driven, she is at her most relaxed when most engaged with the “Rubik’s cube” of international diplomacy. She is a deeply serious person, not an entertainer or a muffin baker. If she took on the job of Secretary of State to prove that she had the balls necessary to make the transition from first lady to first wo(man) then there is ample evidence in these pages that she has done just that. She is both an example to young women around the world and a cautionary tale – though never much of a Hillary lover, I was left hoping that tale may yet have a happy ending.

Perhaps, after the second President Clinton has left office, she might write her story again, but with her foot off the brake and a better title. “Iron Your Own Shirt, Buddy”: that would work.